Candy Stripers - Give 'Em Some Sugar, Baby

Candy Stripers

2006

aka Species XXX;

Hospital Macabro

Windchill Films/Snowfall Films

Approx. 89 min - Rated R

I've had Candy Stripers in my Netflix DVD queue for about 10 years or so.  It's always been hovering around somewhere around the middle of the queue as other movies came and went.  It sort of became invisible to me, I think.  Well, that was rectified this past week when it showed up in my mailbox. 

It was the first "modern" movie I've watched in probably two weeks, what with being on my VHS binge and all. 

I don't want to say that I had high hopes for the film, after all it's about aliens disguised at nurses sucking the life out of men, but I had hoped that it would have at least lived up to it's premise.  Sure it's got a bevy of somewhat attractive women in candy strip uniforms.  Sure there are aliens.  Sure they invaded a small town hospital and started to cocoon men with alien sex.  Sounds good doesn't it?  Yes.  Yes it does.  It's execution however, is pretty damn lackluster. 

There's still some fun to be had here if you're in the mood for a b-movie.  

A trio of basketball players end up in the hospital after getting into a scrape with the opposing team.  Apparently a broken leg or a fractured wrist is enough to get you admitted in this town.  I don't even know what was wrong with the third guy.  He was in a wheelchair and then he wasn't.  Seemed totally fine after that.  Oh well.

Well, this coincides with aliens invading the hospital.  They take over the bodies of females via the mouth.  Usually an infected female will transfer alien essence (or something like that) to another female by trying to get them to kiss her.  When their mouths get close a nasty green slimy tentacle thing comes out of the infected girls mouth and into the other.  The newly infected nurse will shimmy and shake for a moment and then become an alien.  I guess that's a fairly effective method to spread the alien essence.

The alien nurses are completely addicted to sugar, scarfing down anything sugary that they can get their hands on:  candy bars, donuts or even just sucking down sugar packets.  After the get all hopped up on sugar they roam the hospital looking for unsuspecting men to screw into a cocoon.  Literally.  They wrap them in sugary cocoons.  Poor bastards.

I'm not certain what the alien's endgame is.  It might be just to populate the planet with their own kind.  They also give birth to nasty little larva (that basically look like red slug things) and keep a tentacle thing in the basement that spits out a green sugary substance.  That's really the most I got out of it.  They screw/cocoon the men (presumably for food) and infect the women.  I suppose if you really dug down deep you could come up with some sociopolitical meaning to the film about the battle of the sexes or something, but that's way over my pay grade.

The acting is about what you'd expect from a Syfy Channel made movie...and to be honest aside from a few boobs here and there, this very well could have been.  A few quick edits would make this perfectly okay for TV broadcast.  Which was one of the highly disappointing things.  If you're going to make and R rated movie about killer alien nurses that fuck guys to death, you might want to really deliver on the goods.  The T&A factor is surprisingly low. 

There's a few bits of gore, but the rest of the special effects are really pretty terrible.  Once our hero's figure out how to stop the growing alien horde and start fighting back, the candy striper deaths are some of the most ridiculous computer effects I've ever seen.  Pretty much all that happens is their faces distort with terrible CGI (not even distort into an alien face....just basically wiggle around).  It was quite laughable and just about anything would have been better than that effect. 

GORE:

As I mentioned before there are a few good gore gags:  A man gets his heart ripped out and another guy gets his junk bitten off.  Plus there's all the cocooning and such.

T&A:

There are some boobs, but not as many as you would think!

MONSTERS:

For the most part the aliens strictly take the form of buxom nurses.  Sometimes they have a weird scaly arm or something.  At one point a nurse peels off her human face to reveal a reptilian visage below.  There's also the green tentacle thing that comes out of the nurse's mouths as well as the red baby slug things that they vomit up. 

FINAL THOUGHTS:

This is definitely a "check your brain at the door" movie.  If you can get past the wonky acting and questionable logic, there's some fun to be had here.  Just don't overthink things and you'll be okay!